Buddenbrooks (55 page)

use now trying to memorize any of it: the regular lines, full of pencil marks, numbered by fives all the way down the page, looked hopelessly un-familiar. He barely understood the sense of them, let alone trying to say a single one of them by heart. And of those in to-day's preparation he had not puzzled out even the first sentence. "What does that mean--'deciderant, patula, Jovis arbore glandes'?" he asked in a despairing voice, turning to Adolf Todtenhaupt, who sat beside him working on the register. "What?" asked Todtenhaupt, continuing to write. "The acorns from the tree of Jupiter--that is the oak; no, I don't quite know myself--" "Tell me a bit, Todtenhaupt, when it comes my turn, will you?" begged" Hanno, and pushed the book away. He scowled at the cool and careless nod Todtenhaupt gave by way of reply; then he slid sidewise off the bench and stood up. The scene had changed. Herr Ballerstedt had left the room, and his place was taken by a small, weak enervated little man who stood straight and severe on the platform. He had a sparse white beard and a thin red neck that rose out of a narrow turned-down collar. He held his top hat upside down in front of him, clasped in two small hands ccvered with white hair. Hia real name was Professor 319 Hiickopp, but he -was called "Spider" by the pupils. He was in charge of classrooms and corridors during the recess. "Out with the gas! Up with the blinds! Up with the windows!" he said, and gave his voice as commanding a tone as possible, moving his little arm in the air with an awkward, energetic gesture, as if he were turning a crank. "Every-body downstairs, into the fresh air, as quick as possible!" The gas went out, the blinds flew up, the sallow daylight filled the room. The cold mist rushed in through the wide-open windows, and the lower second crowded past Professor Hiickopp to the exit. Only the head boy might remain upstairs. HarniD and Kai met at the door and went down the stairs together, and across the architecturally correct vestibule They were silent. Hanno looked pathetically unwell, and Kai was deep in thought. They reached the courtyard and began to stroll up and down across the wet red tiles, among school companions of all ages and sizes. A youthful looking man with a blond pointed beard kept order down here: Dr. Goldener, the "dressy one." He kept a pensionnat for the sons of the rich landowners from Mecklenburg and Holstein, and dressed, on account of these aristocratic youths, with an elegance not apparent in the other masters. He wore silk cravats, a dandified coat, and pale-coloured trousers fastened down with straps under the soles of his boots, and used perfumed handkerrhiefs with coloured borders. He came of rather simple people, and all this elegance was not very becoming--his huge feet, for ex-ample, looked absurd in the pointed buttoned boots he wore. He was vain of his plump red hands, too, and kept rubbing them together, clasping them before him, and regarding them with every mark of admiration. He carried his head laid far back on one side, and constantly made fanes by blinking, screwing up his nose, and half-opening his mouth, as though he were about to say: "What's the matter now?" But his re-finement led him to overlook all sorts of small infractions of the rules. He overlooked this or that pupil who had brought a book with him into the courtyard to prepare a little at the eleventh hour; he overlooked the fact that one of his boarding-pupils handed money to the porter, Herr Schlemiel, and asked him to get some pastry; he overlooked a small trial of strength between two third-form pupils, which re-sulted in a beating of one by the other, and around which a ring of connoisseurs was quickly formed; and he overlooked certain sounds behind him which indicated that a pupil who had made himself unpopular by cheating, cowardice, or other weakness was being forcibly escorted to the pump. It was a lusty, not too gentle race, that of these comrades of Hanno and Kai among whom they walked up and down. The ideals of the victorious, united fatherland were those of a somewhat rude masculinity; its youth talked in a jargon at once brisk and slovenly; the most despised vices were soft-ness and dandyism, the most admired virtues those displayed by prowess in drinking and smoking, bodily strength and skill in athletics. Whoever went out with his coat-collar turned up incurred a visit to the pump; while he who let him-self be seen in the streets with a walking-stick must expect a public and ignominious correction administered in the drill-hall. Hanno's and Kai's conversation was in striking contrast to that which went on arDund them, among their fellows. This friendship liad been recognized in the school for a long time. The masters suffered it grudgingly, suspecting that it meant disaffection and future trouble. The pupils could not understand it, but had settled down to regarding it with a sort of embarrassed dislike, and to thinking of the two friends as outlaws and eccentrics who must be left to their own de-vices. They recognized, it is true, the wildness -and insub-ordination of Kai, Count Mb'lln, and respected him accordingly. As for Hanno., Buddenbrook, big Heinricy, who thrashed everybody, coulfl^not make up his mind to lay a finger on him by way of chastisement for dandyism or cow-321 BUDDENBRDOK5 ardice. He refrained out of an indefinite respect and awe for the softness of Hanno's hair, the delicacy of his limb, and his sad, shy, cold glance. "I'm scared," Hanno said to Kai. He leaned against the wall of the school, drawing his jacket closer about him, yawning and shivering:, "I'm so scared, Kai, that it hurts me all over my body. Now just tell me thi*: is Herr Mantel-sack the sort of person one ought to be afraid of? Tell me yourself! If this beastly Ovid lesson were only over! If I just had my bad mark, in peace, and stopped where I am. and everything was in order! I'm not afraid of that. It is the row that goes beforehand that I hate!" Kai was still deep in thought. "This Roderick Usher is the most remarkable character ever conceived," he said sud-denly and abruptly. "I have read the whole lesson-hour. If ever I could write a tale like that!" Kai was absorbed in his writing. It was to this he had referred when he said that he had something better to do than his preparation, and Hanno had understood him. Attempts at composition had developed out of his old pro-pensity for inventing tales; and he had lately completed a composition in the form of a fantastic fairy tale, a narra-tive of symbolic adventure, which went forward in the depths of the earth among glowing metals and mysterious iires, and at the same time in the souls of men: a tale in which the primeval forces of nature and of the soul were interchanged and mingled, transformed and refined--the whole conceived and written in a vein of extravagant and even sentimental symbolism, fervid with passion and longing. Hanno knew the tale well, and loved it; but he was not now in a frame of mind to think of Kai's work or of Edgar Allan Poe. He yawned again, and then sighed, humming tu him-self a motif he had lately composed on the piano. This was a habit with him. He would often give a long sigh, a deep indrawn breath, from the instinct to calm the fluctuating and irregular action of his heart; and he had accustomed himself to set the deep breathing to a musical theme of his own or some one else's invention. "Lo'ok, there comes the Lord God," said Kai. "He is walking in his garden." "Fine garden," said Hanno. He began to laugh nervously, and could not stop; putting his handkerchief to his mouth the while and looking across the courtyard at him whom Kai called the Lord Grod. This was Director Wulicke, the head of the school, who had appeared in the courtyard: an extremely tall man with a slouch hat, a short heavy beard, a prominent abdomen, trousers that were far too short, and very dirty funnel-shaped cuffs. HB strode across the flagstones with a face so angry in its expression that he seemed to be actually suffering, and pointed at the pump with outstretched arm. The water was running! A train of pupils ran before him and stumbled in their zeal to repair the damage. Then they stood about, looking first at the pump and then at the Director, their faces pictures of distress; and the Director, meanwhile, had turned to Dr. Goldener, who hurried up with a very red face and spoke to him in a deep hollow voice, fairly babbling with excitement between the words. This Director Wulicke was a most formidable man. He had succeeded to the headship of the school after the death, soon after 1871, of the genial and benevolent old gentleman under whose guidance Hanno's father and uncle had pursued their studirs. Dr. Wulicke was summoned from a professor-ship in a Prussian high school; and with his advent an en-tirely new spirit entered the school. In the old days the classical course had been thought of as an end in itself, to be pursued at one's ease, with a sense of joyous idealism, But now the leading conceptions were authority, duty, power, service, the career; "the categorical imperative of our philosopher Kant" was inscribed upon the banner which Drr \Vulicke in every official speech unfurled to the breeze. The school became a state within a state, in which not only the 323 masters but the pupils regarded themselves as officials, whose main concern was the advancement they could make, and who must therefore take care to stand well with the authori-ties. Soon after the new Director was installed in his office the tearing down of the old school began, and the new one was built up on the most approved hygienic and aesthetic principles, and everything went swimmingly. But it remained an open question whether the old school, as an institution, with its smaller endowment of modern comfort and its larger share of gay good nature, courage, charm, and good feeling, had not been more blest and blessing than the new. As for Dr. Wulicke himselF^ersonally, he had all the awful mystery, duplicity, obstinacy, and jealousy of the Old Testament God. He was as frightful in his smiles as in his anger. The result of the enormous authority that lay in his hands was that he grew more and more arbitrary and moody--he was even capable of making a joke and then visiting with his wrath anybody who dared to laugh. Not one of his trembling creatures knew how to act before him. They found it safest to honour him in the dust, and /to protect themselves by a frantic abasement from the fate of being whirled up in the cloud of his wrath and crushed for ever under the weight of his righteous displeasure. The name Kai had given Dr. Wulicke was known only to himself and Hanno, and they took the greatest pains not to let any of the others overhear it, for they could not possibly understand. No, there was not one single point on which those two stood on common ground with their schoolfellows. Even the methods of revenge, of "getting even," which ob-tained in the school were foreign to Hanno and Kai; and they utterly distained the current nicknames, which did not in the least appeal to their more subtle sense of humour. It was so poor, it showed such a paucity of invention, to call thin Professor Hiickopp "Spider" and Herr Ballerstedt "Cocky." It was such scant compensation for their com-pulsory service to the state! No, Kai, Count Molln, flattered himself that he was not so feeble as that! He invented, for his own and Hanno's use, a method of alluding to all their masters by their actual names, with the simple prefix, thus: Herr Ballerstedt, Herr Hiickopp. The irony of this, its chilly remoteness and mockery, pleased him very much. He liked to speak of the "teaching body"; and would amuse himself for whole recesses with imagining it as an actual creature, a sort of monster, with a repulsively fantastic form. And they spoke in general of the "Institution" as if it were similar to that which harboured Hanno's Uncle Christian. Kai's mood improved at sight of the Lord God, who still pervaded the playground and put everybody in a pallid fright by pointing, with fearful rumblings, to the wrapping papers from the luncheons which strewed the courtyard. The two lads went off to one of the gates, through which the masters in charge of the second period were now entering. Kai began to make bows of exaggerated respect before the red-eyed, pale, shabby-looking seminarists, who crossed over to go to their sixth and seventh form pupils in the back court. And when the grey-haired mathematics master, Herr Tietge, appeared, holding a bundle of books on his back with a shaking hand, bent, yellow, cross-eyed, spitting as he walked along, Kai said, "[rood-morning, old dead man." He said this, in a loud voice and gazed straight up into the air with his bright, sharp gaze. Then the bril clanged loudly, and the pupils began to stream through the entrances into the building. Hanno could not stop laughing. He was still laughing so hard on the stairs that his classmates looked at him and Kai with wonder and cold hostility, and even with a slight disgust at such frivolity. There was a sudden hush in the classroom, and everybody stood up, as Herr Professor Mantelsack entered. He was the Professor ordinarius, for whom it was usual to show respect. He pulled the door to after him, boWed, craned his neck to see if all the class were standing up, hung his hat on its 325 nail, and went quickly to the platform, moving his head rapidly up and down as he went. He took his place and stood for a while looking out the window and running his fore-finger, with a large seal ring on it, around inside his collar. He was a man of medium size, with thin grey hair, a curled Olympian beard, and short-sighted prominent sapphire-blue eyes gleaming behind his spectacles. He was dressed in an open frock-coat of soft grey material, which he habitually settled at the waist with his short-fingered, wrinkled hand. His trousers were, like all the other masters', even the elegant Dr. Goldener's, far too short, and showed the legs of a pair of very broad and shiny boots. He turned sharply away from the window and gave vent to a little good-natured sigh, smiling familiarly at several pupils. His mood was obviously good, and a wave of relief ran through the classroom. So much--everything, in fact--depended on whether Dr. Mantelsack was in a good mood! For the whole form was aware that he gave way to the feeling of the moment, whatever that might happen to be, with-out the slightest restraint. He was most extraordinarily, boundlessly, naively unjust, and his favour was as inconstant as that of fortune herself. He had always a few favourites--two or three--whom he called by their given names, and these lived in paradise. They might say almost anything they liked; and after the lesson Dr. Mantelsack would talk with them just like a human being. But a day would come--perhaps after the holidays--when for